Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Process vs results

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When it comes to your genealogy research, are you in it for the process or the results? I got to thinking about that question recently when I was teaching a client how to process her genealogy source documents in Reunion. When you’re first starting, it can be a slow process. It definitely gets easier.

As we were working through some documents, she asked me how long it takes me to process a document. (The answer to that question, of course, is “It depends on the document.”) Then she asked, “Does it get faster?”

As a new genealogist, she understood that it’s necessary to analyze and glean information from all her documents (and create a source citation) if she wants to be a researcher, not just a searcher. But she was finding progress to be frustratingly slow. I had to break it to her that, even for experienced researchers, genealogy is a marathon, not a sprint.

That got me thinking: Am doing this for the process or the results? I realized that, speaking personally, it’s about the process for me. I think that’s because I don’t feel there’s a finish line with my genealogy research. There’s always more to learn about my ancestors and I really enjoy the process of discovery. And I actually like the painstaking process of the documentation that follows the discovery.

I’m also a knitter and we have this same discussion in knitting. When I start a project, am I doing it for the finished product or for the enjoyment of the knitting? The answer to that question can inform what projects I take on. A Fair Isle sweater would be (for me) a bear to knit, but if I love them and would wear one with pride, it’s worth the effort. That’s not the kind of knitter I am, however. For me, in knitting as in genealogy, it’s all about the process. I have any number of hand-knit garments, shawls and bags that I ended up rarely using. But I sure loved making them.

How about for you? When it comes to your genealogy research, do you enjoy the process or are you in it for the results? (Or perhaps there’s a whole different element I’m not thinking of.) I’d love to hear.

Photo by Nynne Schrøder on Unsplash.

Gene-alogy vs jen-ealogy

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Here’s a something I’ve been wondering about since I started going to genealogy conferences about five years ago:

Why do some people pronounce our favorite pastime with a short e, like JEN-ealogy?

I’ve always pronounced the word with a long “e” as in “gene.” But I’ve heard some esteemed conference speakers pronounce it with a short e, as in “jen.”

The screengrab from Merriam-Webster.com, above, indicates that my pronunciation is the preferred one. And, in fact, if you go to the website and click on the little speaker icon, you’ll hear the word pronounced that way. But the website also points to another alternate pronunciation, which I don’t think I’ve ever heard: jeen-ee-AL-ogy with a short “a”.

So I’ve put together a little poll: How do you say the word?

I’m looking forward to seeing the results!


My pause on searching: Easier said than done

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Just over a week ago, in my post called Searcher vs. researcher, I vowed to get through the backlog of documents I had downloaded but never processed and to do no online searching until the backlog was gone. I’ll confess to you that my resolve not to search dissolved the very first day.

My curiosity about certain things that came up while I was processing my backlogged documents could not be satisfied by merely jotting down a note on my follow-up task list. So I quickly amended the vow I’d made to myself. Now, I try not to do any searching and downloading but when I do, I process the new document during the session in which I download it.

This is working out well. I have managed to resist the temptation to search but every now and then I go for it. (For example, when I’m processing a Washington state marriage certificate and I know that Washington marriage license applications, which have more interesting information, are also easily found.)

Today, in processing an 1880 census, a grandchild appeared living with his widowed grandmother and I need to verify whose parent that grandchild is before I can add the grandchild to my genealogy software and consider the census document processed. That’s going to require a little searching online tomorrow and I’m okay with that.

So far, this backlog-busting project is going well. I’ve reduced my backlog by 25 documents in the last ten days and have 78 documents in my backlog remaining. It’s feeling good!

My evolution from paper to digital

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I just re-read a blog post I wrote on August 12, 2012, just a couple of months after I started this blog, called How I organize my family history research. It outlines how I organized my research back in the day, when I kept everything on paper. If you have all your genealogy documents on paper, you might find it helpful.

What struck me in reading this six years later is that, with the exception of using Reunion software, I no longer do anything I outlined in that article. Wow!

Specifically, I don’t print documents. Therefore I don’t file documents. And I almost never access the documents I printed and filed six years ago. If I wanted to see them and didn’t already have them filed on my hard drive, I would just go online and download them. The exceptions are the few documents I have that were mailed to me. And I scan those whenever I come across them.

Am I better at organizing my genealogy research now than I was in 2012? Not necessarily. I’m a professional organizer and I did a great job of organizing my papers back then. But is my current system better than my 2012 system? For me, the answer is unequivocally yes.

My digital filing system is easier, more convenient and less labor-intensive than my paper filing system was.

If you’re curious about my evolution of paper to digital, check out these posts:

It’s so fun having a blog so that I can look back and see how things have changed over the years. This transition from paper to digital has undoubtedly been a positive change for me!

My electronic file system continued to evolve and in 2021 I published an Orderly Roots Guide called How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow that provides detailed information on how I organize my own genealogy research, which is now 100 percent digital. The downloadable pdf is 37 pages and available for $19.99.

Photo by Tom Woodward via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.